We got an e-mail from Barker this week with the final travel itinerary for internal China travel. We are all really excited about it. Jim and Debbie Heverin did a nice job in their blog of describing the day-by-day plans so I figured I'd just link to their entry: http://heverin.blogspot.com/2007/07/we-have-travel-itinerary.html. Not much more I can add to that. We are totally psyched and are ready.
One funny thing that I've been thinking about on the itinerary relates to the choice of airline: we are flying ANA to Beijing via Tokyo. My brother-in-law David Cohen told me that he has flown ANA to Asia a few times and he said that in business class, they have unlimited Japanese noodle bowls. For some reason, I can't seem to get that out of my mind. I can just picture myself eating 3-4 huge noodle bowls over the course of the 19+ hour flight just to pass the time and then I'll either be feeling great or I'll feel like a sumo wrestler. And it's also a sorry fact that with everything to be excited about on this trip (you know, little things like meeting our daughter and seeing the Great Wall of China and the Imperial Palace), I'm thinking about how great it is that we get unlimited noodle bowls on the plane! People who like food will understand.
Separate from sharing news about the China travel itinerary, Rachel has been urging me to put in more sports metaphors to my blog posts. I think that's pretty funny because when I first posted the sports metaphor entry (scroll down to July 5 posting), R thought it was strange. But she said the she got good feedback from several friends on this. So I'm urged to do more. As I told her, you can't just do a perfect sports metaphor. It has to ripen like a good wine. But I have been thinking about this for a few days in particular because this weekend is the British Open golf tournament -- site of the famous 1999 Van de Velde meltdown where he choked off a 3-stroke lead on the 18th hole on Sunday. I have been thinking about two metaphors: one complex and one pretty simple. First the simple one: don't pull a Van de Velde. Van de Velde was ahead by 3 strokes and on the final hole he pulled out a driver instead of an iron or a 3-wood off the tee. Bad move. If he had picked an iron, he would have probably won the tournament. His driver shot put him in a bad spot. But with a 3-shot lead, he still could have recovered. Instead of laying up and getting back into a good spot to win the tournament, he tried to go for the green on his second shot. He ended up in the river and the rest is history. So I'm feeling a bit like we have a 3-shot lead these days. We got our referral. We got travel approval. We have suitcases. We have a few really cute baby outfits courtesy of R's shopping excursions over the past few weeks. We have notified work that we're leaving. We just need to make it through next week -- no drivers off the tee. Three wood up the middle. Keep the head down. Don't listen to the crowd noise. We've been doing this process for two-and-a-half years.
Or as my high school tennis coach (Mr. Wall) used to say, "We've been training hard for this, boys. Just need to execute like we did in practice." Not sure how that applies to waiting for the adoption, but it's funny to think about Mr. Wall and the Woodside High tennis team. Mr. Wall was a former marine and was a total hardass. He used to follow us in his car when we ran around Woodside hills and always had us in better mental and physical shape than the opponent. He once gave an impassioned speech in which he said: "This is a team. We need to act like a team. We need to think like a team. It's a team when we go to practice. It's a team when we leave practice. It's a team when we go to a match. It's a team when we are dismantling the other guys. It's a team. Are there any questions?" And every wise-ass bone in my body wanted to raise my hand and ask, "Mr. Wall - just one queston, sir, that I'm not so clear on. Is it a team?" Didn't have the guts to do that. He would have kicked my ass off the team (and possibly put me in the wrestling room and fired tennis balls at me with the ball machine like he would do on rainy days when we couldn't practice). But it would have been a great story and would have been worth it in retrospect.
The other sports metaphor I've been thinking about relates to football and applies to how best to respond when the other person (R, for example) is being what I might call irrational or unreasonable(disclaimer: hardly ever happens. And I do my share of freak-ons as well). In any case, when I get in one of those situations, I think about the hard count in football. You know - when a team is on fourth and inches and instead of trying to go for the first down, they try to draw the other team offsides by having the quarterback do a hard count (Hut..Hut.. Hut HUT etc.). Everyone on both sides of the ball knows this is going to happen. It's the oldest trick in football. So in the defensive huddle, all of the guys say "remember: nobody fall for the hard count." But then invariably someone falls for the hard count and the offense gets the first down as a result of the 5-yard offsides penalty.
So how does this apply to our situation? The simple fact is that with all of the stresses and pressures that come and go in life, there's always going to be some moment where the other person acts in a way that isn't 100% rational or calm. That's the hard count. You pretty much know it's going to come. You tell yourself it's going to come. And when it comes, the right thing to do is to be disciplined on defense and not fall for it. You just calmly wait there and the offense is forced to call time out and punt the ball.
The other part of not falling for the hard count is that you will fall for the hard count. That's just life. And when you do fall for it, just take the 5-yard penalty. Don't get caught on a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct call. It's not a question of whose fault it is. The game isn't always fair. They never get the guy who throws the first punch or steps on your head at the bottom of the pile -- just the guy who responds. So, rule for the day: don't fall for the hard count, and when you do fall for it, take the 5-yards and go back to the huddle.
Ok - enough sports metaphor pontification for one day.
J.
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